This is actually pretty big news - both exciting and tragic at the same time. Opera has revealed Opera Ice, its next mobile browser, to PocketLint. This new browser represent a big shift in both user interface as well as rendering engine, since it has a new, unique interface, as well as a new rendering engine... New to Opera, that is, as it's a WebKit-browser.

"(B)ut Boilesen claims it's simply not up to par with browsers like Chrome and Safari."

Well, I guess this depends on what you are after but for me, Opera is already far better than Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS, at least in terms of speed, stability, utility, presentation of content, and especially UI.

Perhaps, being a lowly, merely interested hobbyist type and no real geek, I am not really aware of what I could achieve with my mobile browser given a move to webkit but on the whole, I only find extensibility useful in the desktop/laptop space. Am I missing something very obvious?

The way Opera operates, as it were, allowing me to navigate content with limited screen real estate but at the same time making it easy to see how one should navigate via the current UI, is what makes it attractive. I don't really care about he move to a new rendering engine but I am more than slightly perturbed about all this talk of gestures replacing present UI elements.